Anurag Agarwals' Threat Modeling Blog

Thursday, October 11, 2012

After a summer of high profile attacks on encryption including password, credit card and private user information exposure, new attacks on SSL and just plain lack of encryption all together on important data, it seems like something as critical as implementing encryption through an organization is a difficult and expensive task requiring skilled experts. But with terabytes of information on basics of encryption over the Internet, the knowledge should not be beyond the reach of the average user.

This fall, we at MyAppSecurity have released a new quiz on encryption to test and educate yourself on the very basics of encryption. Armed with this knowledge, one can explore freely available resources online to further bolster their knowledge on the field of cryptography. You can test your knowledge of encryption at: http://www.myappsecurity.com/application-security/encryption-quiz/

We want you to be among the first people to enjoy this quiz. We invite you to share these links and we welcome your comments and suggestions.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

After speaking with a lot of developers we realized they are
looking for a fun, quick way to enhance their knowledge about the secure coding
aspects of development. We have put together a series of interactive quizzes
which test security professionals’ and software developers’ secure development
awareness while teaching them how to build more secure software. Please find
links to the first two, below. The first quiz is based on the OWASP Top Ten
Project and the second quiz is based on best practices of secure coding.

The OWASP Top 10 is a list detailing the most critical software security risks
facing organizations with the goal of raising awareness about application
security. Based on this knowledge an organization can measure the strength of
its application security controls in place and determine what counter-measures
to open threats need to be put in place.OWASP (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2010-Main).

Secure Coding:
The most efficient solution to managing one’s application security risk is to
take security into consideration right from the very beginning of the software
development process and ensure that security is built in at every phase of the
adopted software development lifecycle. This can be made possible by developers
well educated on the available security resources needed to write secure code.
Test your secure development awareness by taking our quiz:

Sunday, July 31, 2011

We had recently developed a quiz to help an organization test their developer's knowledge of OWASP top 10. I thought it would be a good idea to make it public and let other organization use it for their development teams as well. This is a very basic quiz but I do plan to add different levels and more questions to it and bring randomness in the questions as well.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback or suggestions that others may have.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

We are starting an OWASP threat modeling project to standardize a threat modeling approach which can be used by various companies. During the OWASP portugal summit I had a very meaningful and positive discussion on this topic and got support from a lot of people in the community. You can find out the results of the discussion at the OWASP Threat Modeling project page

If you would like to join the project, please join the mailing list at

Thursday, August 19, 2010

I am pleased to announce Intellipass (a behavior based password lockout mechanism). Most of the password lockout mechanism today are static, which means, they lock a user out after a certain number of incorrect password attempts. This feature is implemented to prevent brute force attempts against the login functionality. Even though this feature does what it’s supposed to, it has its own shortcomings too.From a security point of view, this feature can be abused by a bad guy to lock most or all of the users by writing a script with all the possible permutations and combinations for a username (which are mostly alphabets, if not alphanumerical), resulting in a denial of service.From usability point of view, there is always a debate as to the number of attempts to be allowed before locking a user account. Most websites allow 3 attempts while some (very few) allow 5 or sometimes 7. What is the right number for this feature is a subject of debate or at least a different blog post. However, It is a big inconvenience for the user if he is locked out.

Till now, there is no other option but to implement a static password lockout mechanism, which has become a de-facto standard for almost every website. Intellipass tries to bridge the gap between the security and the usability aspect of this feature. By storing every login attempt of a user, Intellipass can intelligently understand user’s past behavior and act accordingly. For ex. If a user locks himself out every time, then Intellipass will dynamically increase the number of attempts from 3 to 5 or from 5 to 7. On the other hand, if a user logs in first or second time every time he or she tried to login in the past, but for some reason has taken 3 attempts this time, Intellipass will automatically reduce the number of attempts from 7 to 5 or 5 to 3. The second component of Intellipass is throwing in a random captcha or insert a time delay between the login attempts to prevent automated attacks.

Initial release will be in JAVA. We are requesting for everyone to send in their suggestions and ideas as to what can be done to make Intellipass usable by various companies. More details on Intellipass can be found here.

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Ever wondered how a hacker hacks all these credit cards? Do you think hacking a website is difficult? What are the skills required to hack a website?

ISSA NY Metro chapter is organizing a 3 hour workshop on web application security. This session will show you how easy it is to steal credit card numbers, SSN, etc by doing a SQL injection attack or how you can steal passwords, hijack a session using Cross Site Scripting (XSS). This session will not only make you think like a hacker but also make you find and exploit vulnerabilities in a live web application that closely resembles those containing your personal information, credit card numbers and even medical history.Attendance is free for ISSA members and $35 for non members. This is a hands on session so please bring a laptop to this event to fully benefit from the material that will be presented. If you do not have a laptop, you should still attend and share with another member, or follow along on the big screen. PLease do not send RSVP, instead register at the link below.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

As some of you know that I joined WhiteHat Security as a Director of Education Services since Dec 2007 to build their training division from scratch. Though it has been a very demanding job but it has been very satisfying too. I enjoyed working with various companies, training their developers and QA professionals and resolving their web application security issues. Through training, I not only trained people at various companies but also got a chance to interact with different development and security professionals and understand the challenges they were facing and guided them in building a solution that works.

Though WhiteHat is more about finding problems (vulnerabilities) and they do a wonderful job of it, I consider myself more of a solutions guy, meaning how to fix those vulnerabilities and that is where my past experience as a developer and architect, helps me a lot. Not to mention my experience as a Technology Risk Officer at Citigroup, where I contributed in building a Technology Risk Management program to protect their web applications. So, being a solutions guy, training was a perfect fit for me at WhiteHat but now I want to do more than just training, I want to utilize my skills to help companies in addressing their web application security challenges through my own company "MyAppSecurity".

I also want to thank WhiteHat for giving me the opportunity to work with some of the brightest brains in the industry. Its been a wonderful experience and I got to learn so many things not just about the security field but also about on the operation side of a small business. I will definitely be using this experience in establishing my own company. I want to wish WhiteHat Security luck in achieving their goals. I am definitely keeping my stock options :)

If any of you guys are looking for solutions to resolve your web application security challenges, feel free to shoot me an email at anurag (at) myappsecurity (dot) com or call me at 919-244-0803.